Edward Timpson and his mother Alex on fostering 90 children

The MP Edward Timpson grew up with his two natural and two adopted siblings –
as well as a changing population of almost 90 vulnerable children fostered
by his mother. Now the Minister for Children and Families, he has resolved
to reform the care system that failed them.

Alex and Edward Timpson at the family home in CheshirePhoto: Inzajeano Latif

Friday afternoon in his constituency office in Crewe, and Edward Timpson, the Minister for Children and Families, is sifting through a foot-high stack of letters on his desk. People write to him about their housing applications, their benefit claims and their hip replacements. A disgruntled pensioner troubled by frequent rat infestations will receive a polite but firm letter on parliamentary paper the colour of clotted cream reminding him that bin removal is the council’s concern and not a matter for central government. The office, in a pedestrian street in the town centre, is friendly, if characterless, the only personal touch a photo-montage on the wall behind him. Like so many politicians keen to prove fitness for office, Edward Timpson, 39, runs.

He has the London and New York marathons under his belt, and there is a photograph of him and his wife, Julia, also 39, competing in the Nantwich Triathlon last year, raising money for a local charity supporting children with metabolic diseases. Their three children, Sam, nine, Elizabeth, seven, and Lydia, five, are also featured, in the garden, riding bikes, having fun in a swimming-pool. If Timpson is mulling over a complex ministerial issue, such as, say, the future of adoption and fostering in England and Wales, he will look at these pictures and think, ‘What would I want for them?’

At his parents’ home, deep in the lush Cheshire countryside,the member for Crewe and Nantwich is first and foremost Alex Timpson’s sensitive middle child – fishing in the biscuit tin for a Jammie Dodger (‘my favourite’) and letting her do all the talking. ‘You were quiet but you were never a sulker, were you, Edward?’ she says. ‘His sister [Victoria, now 44 and a primary school teacher] was a terrible sulker. When Edward felt overwhelmed he would just dis­appear into himself.’ ‘Still do,’ Timpson mumbles. ‘Don’t even bother talking to me before eight o’clock in the morning because you will not get a response.’

Timpson is fiercely protective of his family’s privacy, and I have been asked not to describe their house. I suspect this is chiefly because he was the subject of a sustained ‘toff’ campaign during the 2008 by-election, when activists marched through Crewe in top hats and tails. So I will say only this: it is the house of successful business people – his father,John, is the head of the Timpson chain of shoe repair and key cutting shops, which has been in the family for five generations – and it is tastefully done out. The family moved here in 1987, and after more than 20 years of almost constant child-rearing – Alex has fostered approximately 90 children and adopted two – it was looking tired, so she has spent the past two and a half years tarting it up. ‘Not me personally, that would have been a disaster. I had a designer,’ she says. And it looks as though she has had a lot of fun. She is particularly fond of the fake grass she has had chopped up and made into mats. There’s a fair bit of pink (pink Smeg fridge and pink chenille sofa cushions), but the overall effect is not lavish but quirky, child-friendly and modern – sort of Designers Guild meets Royal Doulton.

Edward (left) and Alex Timpson with two of the many children who have joined their household. Photo: Family Archive

In the end the people of Crewe voted with their feet, and Timpson overturned a 7,000-strong Labour majority held by the late Gwyneth Dunwoody, but he seems to have taken the ‘outing’ of his parents very personally. ‘By nature I’m a conformist, but I think I’ve got a little of my mother’s rebellious streak,’ he says. ‘I don’t like the idea that people take one look at me and assume they know who I am.’ Who do you imagine they think you are? He looks extremely put out. ‘A sort of caricature – which was somehow reinforced during the by-election. White, male, public school [he went to Uppingham], barrister. But anyone who knows me knows I am neither stuck up nor full of myself, and I’m not in politics for personal gain.’

Timpson spent 10 years at the Bar representing both children in care and parents whose child­ren had been taken from them by the state. ‘But by the time I got there most of the damage had been done, and all you could do was patch things up,’ he says. ‘I felt so frustrated. I thought, “There must be more I can do.” If you want to change the lives of children in the care system, politics is a good vehicle.’

If that is the truth, no one could be better equipped for the job. The baby of the family until Alex started fostering when he was four, he recalls frequently coming down to breakfast to find a new child at the table wearing his shorts and socks. ‘I’d think, “Hang on, those are my favourites…”’ According to Alex, Timpson’s reaction when the first foster child arrived was to lock himself in his bedroom and refuse to come out. ‘I think it was very hard for him to begin with, and I did worry about that. I always tried to make sure that he could escape when he needed to.’

Alex became a short-term foster carer in 1978. At that time the longest a child could stay in short-term foster care was six months (‘your opinion counted for nothing,’ she says). Her first foster children were brothers of four and six, who rode round and round the kitchen on a wooden trike shouting, ‘F*** off! F*** off!’ at the tops of their voices. ‘My children, who had never heard that kind of language, sat at the table with their eyes popping out of their heads.’ But when the time came for them to leave, she couldn’t bear to let them go. ‘I had been told they were going to lovely new parents, but in fact they were sent back to the children’s home, which was a ghastly place. I felt I’d let them down, and it took me a long time to get over it. Everyone makes the same mistake with their first foster child­ren. You get so emotionally involved you vow never to do it again, because your heart is broken.’

Alex’s own background is financially strapped gentry. Her father died when she was five, and her mother, Irene, took in lodgers and worked as a secretary to make ends meet. When Alex announced her engagement to John Timpson, Irene considered she was marrying beneath her. ‘Trade, you see,’ she says with a chortle. She describes a happy, ‘free-range’ childhood in Lymm near Warrington. ‘Although I was quite, um, difficult.’ She loathed boarding school and says, ‘I’ve never been very good with rules.’ In fact she positively rejoiced in breaking them. She tells a story about the daughter of a family friend, which is hilarious and awful in equal measure. ‘Laura, her name was. She was a beautiful girl, very clever, with long blond curls, and I hated her so I got a pair of scissors and chopped her hair off. I fed her aspirin, too. I’m not proud of it.’ Maybe this is part of the reason she has such an affinity with troubled children. ‘Some of my grown-up foster children have described this kind of behaviour as a sort of “red mist”,’ she says. ‘The red mist comes, you can’t stop yourself doing something destructive, then afterwards you don’t know why you did it.’

She doesn’t remember feeling special herself. ‘Even as a small child I always felt slightly sidelined,’ she says. Her late brother, Robert, three years her junior, was captain of cricket and academically brilliant, ‘everything I wasn’t. I was always very jealous of him, which I feel bad about now, because he was a lovely man.’ When her mother asked her, aged 10, to teach him to ride a two-wheeler, she pushed him over the garden wall, knocking him unconscious. ‘I can still remember that feeling in my stomach of absolute fear, thinking, “What am I going to do?”’

Marrying John Timpson was a turning point. ‘But I could never be a lady who lunches, and I’m not cut out for committee work. So when I couldn’t have any more children after Edward, I thought, “I know, I’ll foster.”’ She answered an ad in the local paper, then she and John had a series of interviews with social workers, and their names were put forward for consideration by the fostering and adoption panel. Naively she thought all that was needed was ‘a bit of structure and a good scrub’, but soon realised that those things only paper over the cracks. ‘You need special skills to cope with the emotional harm these children have suffered,’ she says.

Children arrived who had been burnt and beaten and stabbed with nappy pins; children who had been so horrifically abused that they had become addicted to negative attention on the grounds that any attention, however painful, is better than none. How did she deal with it? ‘Not terribly well to begin with, but you learn to ignore the 20 occasions when they slam the door, and praise them the one time they shut it quietly. I’m not a great believer in showering children with indiscriminate praise, but these child­ren needed it. I always tried to find something positive to say, even if was, “You have eaten your supper well tonight.” Or, “That was a lovely smile.” Because addiction to negative attention is one of the most difficult things to overcome – isn’t it, Edward?’

Timpson absorbed attachment theory with his mother’s milk. ‘Trying to unravel all that takes a lot of effort,’ he says. ‘The frustration of having a child for a short time is that you start that work – sometimes consciously, sometimes it just happens – then they get moved on. We had quite a few like that.’

Alex suspects that she and John were initially discriminated against by social workers because their own children went to private schools. She detected a sort of inverse snobbery, which quickly disappeared. ‘Fostering isn’t about the size of your house or the make of your car, it’s about what you can give emotionally, and I felt I was the right person to do that job.’ She had a number of babies from a few days old, and as a teenager Timpson often did the night feeds. ‘Seeing them with their new adoptive parents for the first time is as close as you come to that moment in the delivery room with your own child­ren,’ he says. ‘There’s just this huge love and joy.’

David, a short-term foster child, was eight when he arrived, but after a few months it began to be clear that he couldn’t go home. ‘I was told if I didn’t keep him he’d go to a children’s home, and I couldn’t let that happen.’ Alex says. David was fostered long-term and ended up staying for 10 years as a de facto family member. He now runs a window-cleaning business, and visits every fortnight with his two children, who call Alex ‘Granny Alex’.

Henry, now 25, came at 12 days old; when he was 14 months Alex applied to adopt him and was terrified she wouldn’t be allowed to. ‘I’d have been one of those women you see on the news who disappear with a baby,’ she says. The family also adopted Ollie, then ‘an absolutely minute, funny-looking little boy’, when he was six. On their first outing he hurled himself through a bed of nettles, shouting, ‘Watch! They don’t hurt me!’ ‘If I had known then what I know now, alarm bells would have rung,’ Alex says drily. Would you have left him in the children’s home? ‘No, I couldn’t have done that, but I would have handled him in quite a different way, because he had severe behavioural problems, and what worked for my child­ren didn’t work for him.’ Like Edward and his older brother, James, now 41, Ollie boarded briefly at Uppingham from the age of 13 but was neither emotionally nor physically mature enough to cope. Instead they found a special boarding school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, where he thrived under closer supervision. Ollie is now 36, holding down a job, and ‘an absolutely charming guy,’ Edward says.

Timpson has been most influenced by Ollie’s path – and perhaps by thoughts of how it could have been different. Only eight himself when Ollie arrived, he remembers the starkly municipal child­ren’s home where they first met him, and the ‘terrible family holidays’ when Ollie would constantly kick off or run away. ‘One day he wet his pants 24 times. When we went out for a meal, he had to chew every mouthful of food 100 times. They were tics, really. Because he had been in care for so long, he was incredibly nervous and distressed, a very frightened little boy and extremely difficult to manage.’

Currently there are almost 93,000 children in local authority care in England and Wales, and 4,000 of those are waiting to be adopted. Each local authority has an adoption team operating independently, and on top of those, there are about 30 private agencies, all doing the same thing. Timpson is attempting a radical shake-up of the system, removing local boundaries to link children across the country much more quickly with potential adopters. The Adoption Gateway is now up and running. But to place the backlog of child­ren with new parents and cope with the 600 more children in care each year, there also needs to be structural reform – this year local authorities have received a £150 million Adoption Reform Grant to spend on recruiting adopters.

Timpson set out his stall in an emotional letter to foster carers just before Christmas, promising them more in-depth training and greater powers to act on child­ren’s behalf. He has also pledged to look into the educational attainment of looked-after child­ren – only 15 per cent achieve five good GCSEs, compared with 58 per cent of child­ren not in care. He admits to a mounting sense of panic that he may not have time in office before the general election in 2015 to see everything through. Certainly he has a crisis on his hands. Of the 1,900 children’s homes in the UK, 75 per cent are privately run (some of them home to only one child), costing local authorities up to £250,000 per child a year. Children are routinely placed hundreds of miles away from their home towns, leaving them desperately vulnerable, with highly organised trafficking gangs potentially knowing more about their whereabouts than the local social services. According to figures obtained by the NSPCC, somewhere in the region of 10,000 child­ren went missing from care last year – and that is probably a gross underestimate, as only 29 out of 43 police forces in England and Wales responded to the survey in full. The Government’s official figure is 930, which is so way off the mark that it brings the entire care system into question. In fact in April last year the All Party Parliamentary Group for Runaway and Missing Children and Adults found the system not fit for purpose.

That this situation has existed unchecked for so long says a lot about how we feel about children in care. The implication is that these children, with their feckless parents and their chaotic lives, are not like yours and mine. Timpson calls it ‘an out of sight, out of mind culture’. He asks, ‘Why are 47 per cent of child­ren placed outside the area where they grew up? Why is the concentration on big seaside towns?’ (Fifty per cent of all children’s homes are in two regions.) He already knows the answers. It is about cost and convenience, and those are two hurdles he has yet to clear.

Timpson meets regularly with children in care aged between eight and 18, as well as some who have left care. There are 110 local authorities now signed up to the care-leavers’ charter, and he wants a commitment from each to give every care leaver a minimum of £2,000 to set up their own home. ‘They are a small group, but they’re significant because if we don’t look after them, the cost to society is immense – half the people in prison under the age of 25 have been in care,’ he says. Children say it’s the little things that hurt. For example, foster carers having to jump through hoops simply to get a child’s hair cut, which makes them feel different. New regulations that took effect on July 1 allow foster carers to do more of the things birth parents do.

Timpson talks enthusiastically about the relatively new concept of ‘kinship care’ – extended family, neighbours and friends who support an entire family. Alex is a kinship carer, too. She claims not to be keen on teenagers yet currently has a houseful. Chloe, 14, a pale girl in leggings and a hoodie, has been living here for two years with her sisters, Amy, 16, and Charlotte, 19. Charlotte was an early foster child; when her sisters were born, Alex was their mother’s birthing partner and the first person to hold both newborns. In a perfect arc of continuity she is now guiding the girls through their teenage years, while their mother recovers from alcoholism.

‘When you’re struggling, you need a surrogate mother, and that’s what I am to the girls’ mum,’ Alex says. ‘But you’re also surrogate mother to about 300 other young people within a 30-mile radius!’ Timpson points out. Alex hoots with laughter. ‘When will it end? I don’t think it will end. These people depend on me, and I like to see their lives improving.’

There is clearly a huge amount of trust involved in these relationships, and Alex admits she may have been taken for a ride once or twice. ‘Well, you know, helping out when the bailiff has been at the door,’ she says breezily. ‘But I have never once been let down. Every single person has paid me back, and that is the truth. I have such a good relationship with them that they don’t want to hurt me.’

Timpson looks dubious. ‘If you give people a lot of attention that they wouldn’t normally receive, there will inevitably be some who take advantage,’ he begins carefully. But Alex is having none of it. ‘Look, sometimes when you’re young, you overspend and you need bailing out: we did it for you when you were at university and we’ve done it for James and Victoria at different times, but these people don’t have anyone to do that for them.’

What I think Timpson means is that Alex has no natural boundaries, and I suspect there were times during his youth when he wished she’d put him – or herself – first. ‘People will call you at ridiculous times of the night, and that’s a pretty regular occurrence, isn’t it?’ Edward says. ‘Ye-es,’ Alex agrees. She now peppers her life with a lot more downtime – meeting friends, football (she is a passionate Manchester City fan) and regular breaks away – ‘essential,’ she agrees. But even these are often associated with helping people. The Oyster Catcher is a social enterprise restaurant in Anglesey, set up by the Timpson Foundation in 2011. Based on Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurants, its aim, in conjunction with Coleg Menai, a further education college in Bangor, is to help what the Government terms Neets (young people not in employment, education or training) to get work in the catering and hospitality industry. It was James, the CEO of Timpson, who came up with the idea, but Alex can’t resist getting involved. She is in and out of the restaurant, providing the personal touches – dog biscuits for visiting dogs and fresh flowers – and she takes a special interest in the ‘cadets’, most of whom have difficult home lives. ‘We have just had our first graduation,’ she says. ‘One has been offered a job at the Fat Duck, a lot have done work experience with Jamie Oliver, and they’ll all be very good professional chefs. And because they have turned their lives around, they have better relationships with their parents.’

Alex volunteers for the Government’s Home Start scheme, helping families to get off the child protection register, and has devoted herself to being a proper grandmother – she sees Edward’s three child­ren at least twice a week (his wife stays at home to look after them). ‘I had no idea until I held my first grandchild that I would love them like my own.

I found that quite shocking,’ she says. She is also something of an expert on daughters-in-law. ‘I took this advice from a very good friend: never offer an opinion, then nothing can come back to you.’

Everything about Alex’s home is tuned to child­ren. There must be 10 booster seats piled under a custom-built unit in the boot room. Does she really use them all? She reels off grandchildren’s names and the days she has them, using both hands. ‘Probably not, but I like to be prepared.’ In the cavernous refurbished downstairs loo, there are two basins, one high, one low, for little hands, and two lavatories, set side by side; outside, a wonderful wooden climbing frame that would be at home in a country park has been lovingly restored for future generations.

I ask Timpson if it has occurred to him that his interest in children in care is a way of having a relationship with his mother. There’s a pause. ‘It binds us together,’ he says. ‘If I didn’t have an interest in children I think I’d find it difficult to cope with the way she runs her life. Fortunately for me, I was able to embrace it. I understand why she does it, I just wish she’d take her foot off the gas sometimes.’

As I leave, Chloe and Amy are sitting at the kitchen table, playing with their phones and flicking through a copy of Hello!. Henry appears through the open door with his rescue dog, Sandy, to collect some jeans Alex has altered for him. ‘Perhaps I needed to feel loved and wanted,’ Alex says, plopping down on a kitchen chair occupied by a highly vocal and slightly delinquent-looking cat. ‘I certainly wanted and loved them all. It hasn’t always been easy, but I feel I’ve had a lovely life and it’s been hugely enriched by these wonderful young people who have crossed my path.’